daveb wrote:
ACL on Products
I think for products can be applied the same approach as for categories: define which are subject to ACL and for which roles they will be published as well as an ACL tab in the administration.
Bulk ACL on Products
This feature, alike Bulk edit product variants, will be required when there is ACL on several categories or products. It needs a search products by product name, category, manufacturer and SKU, as well by ACL Applied (true/false) and to which role. The resulting edit grid contains name and SKU and columns for selection/deselection of ACL Applies and each one of the roles. It will be very convenient to have tools for selection/deselection of each column....
UPDATE
ACL on Product Variants
I found another real life case in which ACL on Product Variants is very helpful. It can be handled in a similar fashion as ACL on Products
Case 5) International training center (Multi-store): The center has IT training facilities in one or two cities of 4 countries in Latin America. It has a catalog of around 400 different courses which are given several times per year in those locations.
Solution: Each course is set as a product with a very long description to present objectives and detailed contents; a link to download PDF with all info; previous courses (using related products) and following courses (cross sells). Each combination of the course with a date and a location is created as a product variant, so each course (product) will have as many variants as its given in each date/location. Similar to the pizza case create 4 customer roles (C1, C2, ...) corresponding to the 4 countries. Set ACL on Product Variants and each variant will be assigned the role corresponding to the country where it takes place. As in the pizza case each visitor is assigned a role corresponding to URL the country which he entered.
I'd like to point out I'm not adverse to ACL on PV per se but
Given the courses are held in different countries you/the storeowner may want the ability to have separate reviews of each course-location. Reviews are only available on the product level so you would be forced to reconsider your Information Architecture. Seems to me that a course in a country(Location) is the product and the times/dates of the courses would be the variants?
If there are 5 times(variants) for 1 course in 1 location then setting ACL on the product is going to be 5x less work for the admin.
lets not introduce a level of complexity that's not required.
I agree that we should not introduce more complexity than needed.
In the example above it was required (and out of the box Nop should
not always solve all needs). Here is the example we had to follow for Latin America:
the product is very complex in term of description and other information so it is not adequate to copy it because updating copies would be a pain. On the right you see a link "View Schedule" to the product variants (
http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/dates.asp?pageid=9&catid=206&courseid=10416&country=United+States) and there you can see they are based ond date and location. As you can see, since the courses are quite standard, product reviews, related products, Facebook likes, etc should be at course level regardless of date/location.
Multi-store/vendorNow that they are on the roadmap for 3.0 I suggest that regarding assigning the catalog to different stores the same fashion as Customer-Role ACL on categories/manufacturersproducts/pv can be applied as Store ACL on categories/manufacturersproducts/pv. In this case I see the use of Store-ACL on product variants to have (out of a general catalog) the ability to define, for the same product, different pricing, shipping requirements, inventory, warehouses, etc. (as different product variants) for different stores.